Raspberry Pi: The robotic teapot from your nightmares | Tech News

For those moments when you wish the cast of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was real, only to realise what a nightmare that would be, here’s Paul-Louis Ageneau’s robotic teapot!

See what I mean?

Tale as old as time…

It’s the classic story of guy meets digital killer teapot, digital killer teapot inspires him to 3D print his own. Loosely based on a boss level of the video game Alice: Madness Returns, Paul-Louis’s creation is a one-eyed walking teapot robot with a (possible) thirst for blood.

Kill Build the beast

“My new robot is based on a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a camera.” Paul-Louis explains in his blog. “It is connected via a serial link to an Arduino Pro Mini board, which drives servos.”

Each leg has two points of articulation, one for the knee and one for the ankle. In order to move each of the joints, the teapot uses eight servo motor in total.

Paul-Louis designed and 3D printed the body of the teapot to fit the components needed. So if you’re considering this build as a means of acquiring tea on your laziest of days, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the most you’ll get from your pour will be jumper leads and Pi.

While the Arduino board controls the legs, it’s the Raspberry Pi’s job to receive user commands and tell the board how to direct the servos. The protocol for moving the servos is simple, with short lines of characters specifying instructions. First a digit from 0 to 7 selects a servo; next the angle of movement, such as 45 or 90, is input; and finally, the use of C commits the instruction.

Typing in commands is great for debugging, but you don’t want to be glued to a keyboard. Therefore, Paul-Louis continued to work on the code in order to string together several lines to create larger movements.

The final control system of the teapot runs on a web browser as a standard four-axis arrow pad, with two extra arrows for turning.

Something there that wasn’t there before

Jean-Paul also included an ‘eye’ in the side of the pot to fit the Raspberry Pi Camera Module as another nod to the walking teapot from the video game, but with a purpose other than evil and wrong-doing. As you can see from the image above, the camera live-streams footage, allowing for remote control of the monster teapot regardless of your location.

If you like it all that much, it’s yours

In case you fancy yourself as an inventor, Paul-Louis has provided the entire build process and the code on his blog, documenting how to bring your own teapot to life. And if you’ve created any robotic household items or any props from video games or movies, we’d love to see them, so leave a link in the comments or share it with us across social media using the hashtag #IBuiltThisAndNowIThinkItIsTryingToKillMe.